America declines and takes me with it, Part the 567th

I don’t have madcap, hilarious scrapes the way The Bloggess does. I wish i did.

Instead, I have days like Friday.

The day began in Lexington, Ky., a perfectly lovely part of the planet. (Nothing I say here is a slur against Kentucky, because I don’t think airports reflect the community unless your community happens to be Hell.) My pals Carl and Charlie and I left for the airport at 7. At the airport, I slogged through security, bought a racehorse snowglobe as a souvenir and made my way to the gate. Plenty of time!

At the gate, we found out our flight to Charlotte (yes, I know that’s the wrong direction, but this is American aviation we’re talking about here) was delayed 10 minutes. Then 45 minutes. Then it was canceled. That’s when the rondelay began. We all lined up at the two rebooking stations. The first guy in my line was rebooking to Sao Paolo. That’s complicated, right? A normal ticket agent might have called in reinforcements, or asked Brazil man to stand aside while the easy passengers were rerouted. We weren’t dealing with normal here, so the guy spent a half hour with Brazil man before apparently deciding that he couldn’t be any help. Carl was pretty Zen about it. Charlie and I were not.

Not that the other agent was a prize. At one point, she wandered off for 10 minutes or so. Time marched on. The rest of our group, headed to Chicago, appeared at the next gate, mostly averted their eyes from our pitiable fate (except for Emily, who tried herself to get us rebooked) as I would have done in their place, and got on their plane and left.

We were in line for two hours. Finally, after negotiations, the agent sent some of us to Louisville with cab vouchers and some of us to Cincinnati, same deal. Oh! And temporarily married me to a random guy from the other line, filling out the vouchers in both of our names. Ditto with the three — three! — tiny meal vouchers. I let him have two. I’m a nice wife that way.

Hi, airline. I’d like you to meet Lexington which, like many smaller cities, doesn’t have many cabs. We waited a half hour outside, and finally the cab company called in some guy who had a night shift who drove us the hour-and-change to Lousiville. Nice countryside. My husband dozed off. So like him!

So now I’m in the Louisville airport. I don’t think my husband said goodbye.

Things are looking up, right? I have to check in again because I don’t have an actual ticket. In front of me in line is a large blond woman and her brood of immense, hulking children. Apparently none of them had ever left the house before, except maybe to bring down large ungulates to feast on.

Here are some of the many, many questions the blond woman asked:

“What is checked luggage?”
“How do I know how much my bag weighs?”
“Who takes the luggage I’m not checking?”
“Where it says ‘the country of my destination’ do I put Mexico?”

This went on for a half hour.

Finally I made it to security where the thing I thought might happen happened. The TSA confiscated my snowglobe.

“Really?” I said. “I bought it at the Lexington airport. I didn’t expect to be here. I’m just going to walk down that hall and buy another. Exactly how are you making the world safer by taking my snowglobe?” And, dear reader, that is when I — not a crier — began to cry.

They took my snowglobe. “Maybe this is the low point of your day and everything gets better from here,” said the chirpy TSA woman. I hate chirpy. (Also, who actually wants to be the low point in somebody’s day?)

As I said I would, I walked down the hall and bought another snowglobe. It was not as nice as the first one, its racehorses being rather Play-Doh lumpy. Carl was in the gift shop too, and as much as I love him, I could not deal with his Zen. If I couldn’t actually expropriate it, it wasn’t going to help.

So I went to the peculiarly named Chili’s Too (maybe because every restaurant everywhere in Hell America is a Chili’s so this is Chili’s too?) sat at the bar and ate a bowl of chili, for redundancy’s sake. There was a mild-mannered Canadian gent who told me my flight was on time.

They are snowglobe haters. Once I bought a snowglobe post-security at an airport in Honduras. Then there was a second security line and they took the snowglobe away. I pointed out that the gift shop was RIGHT NEXT TO this security line, and you could see the snowglobes for sale from there. I won that one.

I bet those TSA mouth-breathers meet in the breakroom and laugh and hold competitions on who can confiscate the most innocuous object. Anyway, I hope the twerp who stole your snowglobe (and for the 12th year, the troglodyte who dropped my notebook) get itchy hemorrhoids for Christmas.

I feel for you, Kyrie. Traveling is a nightmare. I regularly travel to and from Texas and Alaska. It’s 15 hours every time by design! I’ve been pretty fortunate, considering the sort of weather difficulties one can encounter on a route like that. The west coast airports pretty much take weather in stride, I’ve noticed. I doubt Anchorage, in particular, would cancel a flight unless the snow on the runway reaches a two foot depth or the temperature hits -40 F. Another thing that helps: a good frequent traveler program. I’m gold elite on mine, so I get upgraded a lot and I can board early, which means I have room for my carry-ons. Also, never question the TSA. You’re not going to get any answers you like, anyway, so why even try?

I know it probably wouldn’t do much good, but sometimes I think we should declare a No-Travel day. Say July 4. We could call it Independence From Idiocy day, and on that day we all agree not to fly on an airline. Let the empty terminals and security lines teach ‘em a lesson!

3 years ago, they took the snowglobe I bought for my daughter from Yellowstone National Park. I was extremely pissed. I’ll bet that bastard took it home and gave it to his kids. The TSA is the perfect example of a government program that needs to be eliminated.

I, too, had a snowglobe confiscated from me at an airport. I ask you, how is a snowglobe going to blow up an aircraft? I asked the TSA person where my snowglobe is going and she refused to give an answer. Where does all that stuff go? Does it to home with the TSA person who stole/confiscated it? Does it to go charity? Why doesn’t UPS or FedEx have a kiosk in the airport and passengers have the option of letting TSA take their stuff or go back to the kiosk and mail it to yourself?
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Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Obama is going to open up the border in Texas so he can find some new voters while grannies are getting felt up by TSA. Something doesn’t smell right here.

“In front of me in line is a large blond woman and her brood of immense, hulking children. Apparently none of them had ever left the house before, except maybe to bring down large ungulates to feast on.”
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Haha, this made my day, so funny. How long have you been waiting to use ungulates in a sentence? Awesome.

Some of us are old enough to remember when we could even fly with firearms in the cabins of aircraft… A few idiots who wanted to go to Cuba ruined this for us… Never really understood why someone would want to go to Cuba, especially since they would be arrested as soon as they got off the plane anyway…

Huh. After reading this I googled “what happens to the stuff the TSA confiscates” and it actually specifically mentions snowglobes as something prohibited from being carried on an airplane. It also says “boulders” too. Who the heck tries to bring a boulder on an airplane?!

I remember coming back from Mexico in the summer of ’08 and I brought back a half eaten hamburger and fries from Bubba Gump shrimp Co. and the TSA people took me and my meal and sat me down, asked me a few questions about who I was and what I was doing in Mexico, nothing serious. Final question came around and they ask me what was in the box. I opened it to reveal my food. TSA guy : “Are you going to eat that?” Me: UHH yeah it’s over half a burger and like a pound of fries.”

We’re giving a whole new definition to the term “destination weddings”. On my last business trip a waitress married me to an NPR reporter I had just met in the foyer waiting for a table. After I explained that I needed to charge my meal to my own room, she chastised him for not buying his wife’s breakfast. We never did convince her we weren’t together.

Let’s be honest here. The TSA can’t allow the snow globe into the area and they gave you the option of taking it out so you could keep it if you wanted. They don’t confiscate items like this. The nest time you fly don’t be so stupid.

Let’s be bright here. There was NO option of keeping it. They confiscate items like this every minute. Sadly for you, you don’t know what you’re talking about, so throwing around words like “stupid” doesn’t really work for you.

I drive. I used to be a road warrior before 9/11 and spent my life in the airport. Now… I drive. Even my regular trips from MN to TX which takes 2 day, a hotel in Kansas City and 20 hours of driving… I drive.

The present level of ridiculously enhanced airport security was started because of the “underwear bomber.” But since they’re not checking the crotches of our underwear for explosives, then the changes are not only obnoxious, but meaningless. That is, they don’t address the episode that gave rise to them. We’re going through all of this because of some guy who’s too stupid to set himself on fire successfully?

Regarding the agent who “… wandered off for 10 minutes or so …” I suggest that possibly she just had to go to the bathroom.

What you said about the woman who’d “apparently…[never] left the house” made me think of a comment my dad made recently while we were traveling. He said that air travel used to be easy enough that you could start doing it at any time of your life, but now how could someone who hasn’t been doing this his whole life know enough about the rules and procedures to even make it to the gate?